BrookesNews.Com
Monday 27 June 2005
So much is going on in China I sometimes wonder where to start. I know that seems strange. Surely, you ask, if there is so much news, how can there be a problem? A shortage of stories? The problem is one of mood swings. Not mine, but China’s.
On the one hand I see before me a great future for what was once a great country before cultural sclerosis set in, followed by xenophobia and political and economic disintegration that brought humiliation, war and Japanese barbarism.
The culmination of which was Maoist China, a totalitarian state whose emperor concealed his lust for power in the texts of Marx and Engels, the worst evils the West ever visited on an Asian country. Now that death has rid us of Mao, though his shadow lingers, we are left to ask, some 30 years later, what now?
To travel through China is like visiting different countries, such is the enormous differences in wealth and development between regions. Some are what Americans would call “dirt poor”, with people living in hovels.
Then there is Guangdong whose rapid expansion and entrepreneurial flair inspires admiration while its seamier side generates revulsion among those who long for the security of Mao’s iron rice bowl which was never anything but a myth. Sure there is corruption in Guangdong: there’s porn and prostitution; there’s fraud and large-scale embezzlement. The rule of law is largely unknown and contract law barely understood.
But who are Beijing’s mandarins to look down on Guangdong? Give me its seamy side of life any day to Beijing’s phoney Puritanism. I’ll take the honesty of pimps, prostitutes, porn peddlers and scam merchants to any two-bit would-be warlord who calls himself a general.
Guangdong’s dregs and its social flotsam have no pretensions; they know what they are and make no apologies for it. The free market did not create these social strata. It did not instil in them contempt for the law. This is the legacy of Mao’s imperial lunacies. Despite their criminal activities they pose no danger to China. They do not want to goosestep; they do not want to invade other countries and they certainly do not want to be governed by grasping warlords. They just want to make money.
It was Lord Keynes who said it was better for a man tyrannise over his bank account rather than his fellow men. This is why the pursuit of money, of wealth and material wellbeing is so necessary for China’s survival.
There are those in the military who clothe their own lust for power and influence in Chinese nationalism. But Johnson knew such men well.
For him “patriotism was the last refuge of a scoundrel” not because he was not patriotic, he was, but because he knew that for such men patriotism was nothing but a means to serve their own ambitions. I'm not suggesting that every Chinese general is of this ilk, just enough to pose a real danger to China and her neighbours.
To these men military glory is the only currency they know and understand. When they speak of China they really mean themselves, just as Napoleon did with France and Hitler with Germany. This is the type of mentality that defines criticism as treason. What poses a great danger for China opens a window of opportunity for these militarists.
Should the economy be unable to quickly deal with a recession and the resulting unemployment it could create the kind of social tension that strengthened the hands of similar men in the 1920s and 1930s.
If the world could have managed sustained economic growth after WW I Japanese and German militarism would have withered on the vine of prosperity with stiff-necked jackbooted militarists increasingly marginalised, being seen as a remnant of a feudal and perhaps even less admirable age. But they would certainly have been seen as men out of their time.
Instead, the interwar years experienced the worst depression in history and this provided the breeding ground for the kind of nationalism that should be classified as a disease. Could this happen in China? Let’s hope not. What China needs is not more rockets, tanks, bombers and so on. It is a rapid rate of sustained economic growth.
